Cuomo Caught Up in Rare Conflict With Prosecutor

IRONDEQUOIT, N.Y. — An unusually public confrontation between two of the state’s most powerful officials escalated on Thursday. Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, not known for engaging in on-air rebukes of elected officeholders, took aim at Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo over his decision to dissolve an anticorruption panel.

Mr. Bharara went on the radio to criticize Mr. Cuomo for quietly shutting down the panel, the Commission to Investigate Public Corruption. The governor had appointed the panel last year — with considerable celebration — to develop reforms to state law that would protect against corruption in Albany, a real-life petri dish for all manner of political malfeasance.

“If you begin investigations and you begin them with great fanfare,” Mr. Bharara said, “you don’t, I think, unceremoniously take them off the table without causing questions to be asked.”

It was a rare moment in which the governor, a former state attorney general who is accustomed to questioning others, found his own motives under scrutiny, and on a highly charged subject.

On Thursday, Mr. Cuomo — after giving a speech in this Rochester suburb — tried to play down the end of the panel, also known as the Moreland Commission, as an expected and inconsequential step. He said he never intended to create what he called “a perpetual bureaucracy” to investigate wrongdoing.

But the harsh glare on Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, was largely of his own making. The governor, many lawmakers believe, had created the commission last July in a bid to burnish his image as a corruption buster. Instead, Mr. Bharara’s decision to inject himself into the issue put a spotlight on Mr. Cuomo’s tactics, not those of the rogue legislators originally targeted by the governor.

The confrontation followed a request from Mr. Bharara’s office to top commission officials asking them to refrain from destroying investigative files, the first step in a possible shift to federal prosecutors pursuing any leads discovered by the panel. Mr. Bharara’s comments came less than two weeks after Mr. Cuomo announced that he had agreed to disband the anticorruption commission in exchange for approval of new bribery and corruption laws. The commission handed over its files to Mr. Bharara’s office on Thursday.

Several commission members have said that though the files contained some cases that could result in criminal prosecutions, there was no material likely to result in scandals or the arrests of high-profile officeholders.

Mr. Bharara’s comments were unusual in that United States attorneys rarely speak out so forcefully about an elected official who is not a defendant in a pending case. But he has sharply focused on public corruption since his appointment in 2009 and often singles out Albany, which he once said could be found on a map at “the intersection of greed and corruption.”

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Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York in December.Credit
Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

Last April, he urged state leaders to change what he called the pervasive “show me the money” culture in politics. In September, he testified at the Moreland Commission’s first public hearing, saying that corruption had reached intolerable proportions and that he would move to take the pensions of state officials convicted of corruption crimes.

In the radio interview, with Brian Lehrer of WNYC, Mr. Bharara offered a terse rebuke of the decision to shut down the commission in exchange for the new laws, which were approved as part of a broader deal on the new state budget.

“It was disbanded before its time,” he said. “Nine months may be the proper and natural gestational period for a child, but in our experience it is not the amount of time necessary for a public corruption prosecution to mature.”

Mr. Cuomo seemed to have been caught off guard by the pointed doubts over the wisdom of disbanding the panel, which included district attorneys from around the state.

Asked about Mr. Bharara’s comments, Mr. Cuomo suggested he did not see what the fuss was all about, describing the commission as temporary in nature and saying its mission was to prod reluctant lawmakers to pass new laws.

Mr. Cuomo added that the investigatory work by the commission, which the state has spent considerable money to finance, was a lesser mandate. And he said district attorneys and federal prosecutors were already fulfilling the task of investigating corruption.

“I don’t believe we needed yet another bureaucracy for enforcement,” he said. “We needed laws changed, and that’s what Moreland was about.”

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The Moreland Commission situation began last spring, when several lawmakers were ensnared in corruption scandals in rapid succession, several in cases brought by Mr. Bharara’s office. A master of seizing moments, Mr. Cuomo vowed to push for new laws to restore the public’s trust, declaring at one point, “Never waste a crisis, as they say.” He appointed the commission, which he had threatened to create, after lawmakers rebuffed him.

But it soon began to appear as though Mr. Cuomo had opened something of a Pandora’s box, at least from a public-relations perspective.

In the fall, the credibility of the commission was imperiled by reports that Mr. Cuomo’s office had leaned on the panel to limit the scope of some of its investigations. Though the governor’s office denied it had overstepped its bounds, government watchdog groups said they were troubled by the possibility of interference with the panel’s work. Yet the commission embarked upon what it presented as a robust investigatory effort, issuing 200 subpoenas and requests for information and reviewing millions of pages of documents.

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In September, Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, testified at the first public hearing of the Moreland Commission.Credit
Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Watchdog groups were stunned by the abrupt dismissal of the commission, given that the deal Mr. Cuomo reached with lawmakers was significantly scaled down from what he had originally proposed, and did not seem likely to change the fundamental culture in Albany, where money plays an enormous role in shaping policy.

Mr. Bharara also took notice: Five days after Mr. Cuomo’s announcement, Mr. Bharara sent a letter to the commission’s top officials raising the concern that the end of the commission made it look as if Mr. Cuomo had “bargained away” investigations in order to reach a political deal.

“Thinking people wonder why that happened and want to get to the bottom of it,” Mr. Bharara said on WNYC.

Asked on Thursday if he had “bargained away” corruption investigations to strike a deal with lawmakers, as Mr. Bharara had suggested, Mr. Cuomo did not contest that description.

“That’s what it was — by definition,” Mr. Cuomo said.

While Mr. Cuomo said the commission was shut down because it had succeeded in bringing desired reforms, including new legislation to give district attorneys a greater ability to pursue corruption cases under state law, some current and former state and federal prosecutors have a very different view.

Many of them, interviewed for this article, agreed that the reforms had done little to change the basic landscape that faces both corrupt public officials and those who seek to bring them to justice: Federal prosecutors are often in a far better position to attack political corruption aggressively than their counterparts at the state level, which in New York means the 62 county district attorneys, with the exception, in some instances, of the state attorney general.

Mr. Bharara met with the leaders of the commission on Wednesday, and they agreed to turn over all of their investigative work to his office.

Among the areas the commission was exploring were the outside incomes of state legislators, as well as possible abuses of campaign funds and per diem payments granted to lawmakers, according to people familiar with its work.

One of the co-chairmen of the Moreland Commission, William J. Fitzpatrick, the Onondaga County district attorney, said Mr. Bharara’s involvement was appropriate.

“Nobody is going to be indicted tomorrow and nobody is going to be dragged away in handcuffs,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. “But there are matters that clearly need further scrutiny by a prosecutorial agency, and I think Preet is absolutely the right guy to do it.”

Still unclear is the extent to which Mr. Cuomo’s own involvement in the commission could wind up drawing scrutiny. Asked by Mr. Lehrer, the radio host, whether he would be opening a formal investigation into the governor’s actions, Mr. Bharara demurred, saying, “I’m not going to prejudge what we’ll be looking at, what we’ll be investigating and where the facts will lead.”

A version of this article appears in print on April 11, 2014, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Cuomo Caught Up in Rare Conflict With Prosecutor. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe